“In the visions of God He brought me into the land of Israel and set me down upon a very high mountain…” – Ezek. 40:2a
When Ezekiel first saw the vision by the river Chebar, he was thirty years old (Ezek. 1:1). When he saw the vision of the temple, he was fifty (40:1). Twenty years had passed—a two-decade history of one person being transformed from raw material into God’s building.
What happened to our brother in these twenty years? His life was not just filled with hardship; it was an intense process of maturing. Whatever Israel experienced, he had to go through, too, as their watchman. From being restricted in his sleep to cutting his hair to losing his wife (Ezek. 4:4-8; 5:1; 24:16-18), Ezekiel’s intimate dealing was a strengthening process that brought him from despised to empowered. By chapter 40, a full twenty years after such a process began, Ezekiel had the maturity to really see what God wanted to show him.
The book begins with a person, Ezekiel, and ends with a corporate person, the temple. This vision is a vision not many men could see. It’s a vision that can only be shown after this intense transformation in Ezekiel’s life. Like him, we also need to come to a certain mountaintop of maturity in our lives. What we see then is no longer our own needs but God’s need—His building, His dwelling place. All serving ones need this maturing process to see what they’re serving is a corporate God-man expressed, manifested, and seen. Actually, we are serving the saints into the realization of that vision. This building in the vision is something that we are living out every day. Ezekiel’s story is not only his; we, too, are exposed, judged, and recovered in order to build up God’s house according to God’s blueprint throughout our whole lives.
Those twenty years brought Ezekiel through the cycles of blowing, covering, burning, and exposing (1:4) so that something divine could be mingled with humanity. Do we experience such a cycle so that we, too, may be ones to whom God shows visions of His corporate expression? After twenty years of this maturing process, Ezekiel saw the wheel within the wheel, God’s administration, brought to its fulfillment. Ezekiel witnessed the fleeting living creatures once in the sky and far off the ground turn into a building firmly on the earth, a habitation of man and God. Ezekiel could know the temple in a very definite and measured way (Ezek. 40-42). Ezekiel walked through it and experienced its courts, gates, halls, and chambers.
This building was very real to Ezekiel! Is this building real to us, too? As a person brought to “a very high mountain” (40:2) in a mature stage of our spiritual walk, what do we care about, what do we spend time measuring, looking at, and contemplating? Do we care about the building up of the church, serving the saints according to all its details, measurements, and specifications? Have we made known to the saints “the design of the house, its arrangement, its exits, its entrances, its whole design, and all its statutes” according to “the law of the house” (43:12)? God cares that we do, and He has given this vision to certain ones with maturity in today’s church age. May we take heed and go through the judgment, redemption, and recovery process of our spiritual history so that we can also be those who serve the vision of the church unto a divine building—a story of God and man unfolding in space and time. Such is our story in the church life.
Praise the Lord for the 48 chapters of Ezekiel! This authentic, subjective process of maturing in our practical church living must lead us into life and building; it must be measured according to the pattern. As such, we will be saved to the uttermost (Heb. 7:25)—a corporate becoming that transforms all our being, grants us purpose and meaning, and satisfies man and God!
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 8/30/2026, not reviewed by the speaker.)